At some point during all that scrolling, a totally unrelated post catches my eye:

ANYONE KNOW IF THIS CAT HAS A HOME?

A stray cat sneaks into our backyard all the time now, eating the

birdseed that falls from the bird feeder hanging on the tree. He/

she is obviously hungry. I’m worried that he/she will get into the

neighbor’s rat-mitigation bait—that curiosity (and hunger) will

actually kill the cat. The city has a stray rehoming program, but I

wanted to first see if this is anyone’s beloved missing kitty.

(see photo)

I don’t usually read lost-cat posts. I’m not a cat person, and there are so many lost cats in the neighborhood I can’t keep them straight (I hate to judge, though of course I do: Why can’t these people manage to keep their cats inside?), but I think it’s funny that I’ve come across a post about the “stray rehoming” process of cats when I’m thinking about the future “rehoming” process of Lydia. Mostly I’m intrigued because the post seems more concerned with misgendering the lost cat than with finding its owner. I’m mildly annoyed, too, to be totally honest, since there was recently a whole thing about pronouns at work with a colleague (he/him) who manages to work the subject into almost every meeting about every project the company (they/them) is working on. And I’m someone (she/her) who couldn’t possibly be more pro-pronouns! Maybe that’s the unlikely spark that causes this strange new habit to form—the habit that makes me cut and paste and reformat and retitle Small World posts into poems on my computer:

Pronouns

A stray cat

sneaks into our backyard

all the time now,

eating the birdseed that falls from

the bird feeder hanging on the tree.

He/she is obviously hungry.

I’m worried that

he/she will get into the neighbor’s

rat-mitigation bait

—that curiosity (and hunger)

will actually kill the cat.

The city has a stray rehoming program,

but I wanted to first see

if this is anyone’s

beloved missing kitty.

(see photo)

I love my new little prose poem. It’s so cute I can hardly stand it. In my job, the one I’m supposed to be doing when I’m wasting time on Small World—as an archivist for EverMore, a local company that digitizes photos and documents for families and institutions (that’s the short version)—I’m always trying to figure out the value of various pictures, papers, and film clips that arrive on my desk in boxes: what to include in whatever family legacy project I’m working on, and what to leave out. It’s the perfect job for me. I seriously can’t believe I get paid to indulge my extreme curiosity about other people’s families, who they are and where they come from, how their parts—their parents and all their siblings and all their siblings’ spouses and children—fit together, or don’t.

But it’s stressful sometimes, too. How do I know if I’m getting another family’s narrative right? Who am I to determine what’s important to people I’ve never met and know only through their photos and videos? I’m not exactly an expert in this field, given my tiny family of origin. Which is why making my little poems feels like such an escape, especially when I craft this first one. It reads like a super-short story, full of tension and action and pathos—in only a few lines. All I want is more, so I reformat one of the replies and make another poem out of it, too: